Based in Queens and Brooklyn, NYC

NY Fast Food Workers Serve Up a Fight for Economic Justice

The sidewalk in front of the Wendy’s on Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall was choked with people at noon on November 29th. The signs they held were mostly handmade, in English and Spanish, calling for higher wages, more respect on the job. A small group of them held a bright red banner, that read “STRIKE for higher pay for a stronger New York.”

Pamela Flood: “I work hard for my money, I work hard for my kids, and I think we all deserve better. I’ll take two and three jobs to take care of my kids, but while I’m doing that I’m also going to stand up for what I believe in, and what I believe in is that we should be making way more than $7.25, because if a doorman, a security guard, and a janitor can make $12 to $15 an hour, why can’t we?” (Illustration: Molly Crabapple)

A young woman led the rally, her bright red hair pulled back, her voice already ragged from chanting, from shouting her story. I was later told by an organizer she’d been out since 5 AM, showing up to support the first of the fast-food workers to walk out on that day’s strikes, and she’d be onstage at the end of the day, too, whipping up the crowd underneath the glittering lights of McDonald’s in Times Square.

Her name is Pamela Flood, and she works at the Burger King at 971 Flatbush Avenue. She was one of 200 or so workers at New York City’s fast-food restaurants that struck for a raise to $15 an hour and union recognition on that November day, kicking the simmering movement among the city’s lowest-wage workers up another level. She also works at a CVS and attends classes at night, holding down a 4.0 GPA as she studies to be a medical assistant, to better support her three children. Burger King pays her just $7.25 an hour.

Flood drew cheers that day on the picket line when she demanded $15 an hour so that she could take her kids on vacation like the high-paid executives can. “I work hard for my money, I work hard for my kids, and I think we all deserve better,” she told me. “I’ll take two and three jobs to take care of my kids, but while I’m doing that I’m also going to stand up for what I believe in, and what I believe in is that we should be making way more than $7.25, because if a doorman, a security guard, and a janitor can make $12 to $15 an hour, why can’t we?”

With her that day were workers from other fast food restaurants in Brooklyn, community members, other low-wage workers from around the city, supportive clergy, and organizers who’d helped pull together the seemingly-impossible feat of getting hundreds of workers at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC, Taco Bell, and Domino’s Pizza stores across multiple boroughs.

“This is a moral issue,” Kirsten John Foy, a minister and former aide to Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio, told me as the picket line danced behind us. “We can’t live in the wealthiest economy in the world, and treat our workers like they’re from the third world.” (continue reading...)